Rodyle

I think this overlaps more or less with the landspeed record. They stopped using wheels a while back and now use strut skids.

The standard aerodynamic model is, as far as I know, not good enough that constructing a fairing would keep the drag uniform. IIRC: it just takes the drag coefficient for each part and applies it to craft, even if it would be shielded from the wind. So, yeah. I don't really think it's possible to perfectly balance the drag and the centre of mass while using one of each part.

Hrm... Trying some things out right now. Mind if I use girder segments etc as well? Also: how much of an issue is the drag, really? I can understand the weight, but since they'll be attached to a larger spacecraft, does the drag really matter?

Thanks, and I agree. Although I really like the flexibility of smaller wing bits (allows for more roundish shapes), it really adds up in the parts. The moving stuff was for this plane not a real issue, since it was built by design to be very open, but I see where you're coming from. I think it would help if it was possible to make 'meta-parts' out of, for example, wings put together, or multiple stacked fuel tanks. This would make it easier for the physics calculations, while allowing us the same degree of freedom (if not more so, since you can now build larger spaceships) in the building phase.

Haha! I had the same reaction to your Octo-2 flock. ^^

Woohoo! Another good mission for an old SSTO of mine. It delivered 4.28 tonnes (almost its own dry weight) of probes into Kerbin orbit.

Although most of Kerbin and its moons have been at the very least mapped, anything outside the sphere of influence of Kerbin is still a mystery to our green little friends. Is there life on Eeeloo? Can you dance on Ike? To find out UKSC decided it was time to start launching probes to the other planets, to find out what they are like. They decided on four probes, launched in the names of those who started it all those years ago: Bob, Jeb, Bill and Carl. Since the probes had to go a long way, the boffins designed a new class of probes, using the latest in ion technology. Mission plan for these probes is simple: they are sent to a planet or moon, collect as much science as possible using the instrumentation on board and then continue to the next body. However, long-range communication technology is too heavy to fit onto these probes. They will therefore store all data on internal hard drives and to retrieve this data, the probes will have to do a close fly-by of Kerbin. Before all of this, however, the probes need to get to space. Normally, this would've been a job for Jeb, but he was giving a master class on first principle of rocket science (impetu maiore). It was therefore decided that Bob should be the one to do it, since the probes would already been flown by Bill. The boffins attached the probes to one of Bob's old space planes, the Pidgeon. Bob was sceptic; the Pidgeon was a good machine, that was a fact, but he was unsure if it'd be capable of bringing those probes into orbit. The boffins said it was fine, so he set off in the space plane, with the four probes as payload. Bob had to agree with the boffins, however: it did just fine, and after bringing the probes in a 160 KM parking orbit, he returned to UKSC headquarters. Post-mission debriefing: So, yeah. Probes in space. Not the most shiny first thing to do, I know, but I was actually really pleasantly surprised by the entire mission. The Pidgeon is one of my oldest (maybe even my first) space plane, and I was really surprised that it was able to bring this much into space. The entire craft, probes included, weighed around 13.5 tonnes fully fueled, with each probe weighing 1.07 tonnes, which means that the Pidgeon is basically able to bring its own dry weight into a 160 kilometre orbit and land back at KSC. The only issue was that it had a slight tendency to pitch pack a little due to the shifted centre of mass. However, despite this, the thing practically flew itself to orbit. And I'm not boasting here: I wrote the draft for this post while it was doing so. The only issue was that I had to do this mission twice. A bug in the struts caused one of the connectors to be attached to the probes while at the same time being twenty meters away from it. This shifted the CoM far enough to the side to make it impossible to fly. You may still be abel to see it in some of the pictures, since I didn't take any of the second run (which is also why the nose cones protecting the probes go missing; I forgot to put those back on). So yeah, next time: let's fly these probes and do something else, since only doing that would be quite boring. Craft files: full craft: http://pastebin.com/Vd1E28hB Pidgeon only: http://pastebin.com/8RP9xUzP Probe only: http://pastebin.com/Fzp0NKYx

Hello everyone! I recently had to do a clean install of KSP due to some issues. Luckily, I'm a reasonably clever man, This is the introductory post of this... Well, it's basically me storytelling and interpreting the events of what I'm doing in KSP. However, since that's basically what every thread in this subforum is, let's try to make it a bit more specific. This framing allows me to do a few simple things: I can really quickly set up a few basic things or hand-wave why they aren't doing other stuff by saying they've done that already, giving me time to do things which I consider somewhat more interesting to do. Further rules for myself/promises to you guys: - I won't be quicksaving/loading to make everything go my way. A lot of the interesting stuff is exactly when things to go wrong. Only exceptions are when KSP completely bugs out, and even then I may consider it canon. - No part mods or fly-by-wire stuff. I'll use Kerbal Alarm clock, since I do intend for many missions to run in parallel, and maybe I'll later on add some other stuff which is basically cosmetic, but I will fly everything myself and everything will be stock. - I will try to use interesting and/or cool looking designs as often as possible. We've all seen what you can do with ugly asparagus-staging cakes. It's fun, many of them are very impressive pieces of engineering and their builders deserve all the praise in the world, but it doesn't look good and therefore makes for bad television. Cool designs means my pictures look awesome, so I will use them whenever possible. - I'll try to remain in-character until after the images. Any out of character ranting/remarks on what I was flying or whatever will be done in the post-mission debriefing. - I will try to remember to include craft files. If I don't and you're interested: give me a heads up and I will change to include it. - I don't know how often I will update this. I'll try to do so at least once a week, but since I don't know how much time my research asks of me before I actually do it, I cannot promise this. So, yeah... If I think of anything else which needs to be said, I'll edit it in later, I guess. Hope you guys like it, give feedback, etc. etc.

Yeah. I basically am married to Open-TTD. Me and a few friends still play it on our yearly two-week LAN party. Anyhoo: question answer.

Trying it out right now. It seems to work out so far. You have my eternal thanks for the link to the fuel rules (I'm the kind of guy who actually learned the pathing algorithms in Transport Tycoon by heart) and a proper mention in the description of the Roc.

Three Jet engines and two Rapiers, actually. So yeah, I'm working over the operational limit of the engines. I shut down engines whenever a flame-out is imminent, or at least throttle down until it's no longer an issue. Sure, I sometimes get some pull to either side because of this, but this is not the issue. The issue is actually what I explained. After the outer tanks are emptied, the engines start to drain the fuel assymetrically, which slightly offsets the centre of mass, which produces as pull to the right which becomes stronger the longer I fly the plane, since the CoM offset becomes more pronounced. EDIT: Album to show the issue: As you can see: everything's fine until the outer tanks are emptied.

Hello there everyone! I've been working on a SSTO people carrier capable of going to the moon, and I think I've worked out most issues in it. However, one issue keeps biting me in the ass. After the outermost fuel tanks have been emptied (including the hidden one in the back), the fuel drainage of the tanks becomes asymmetric, making it quite dangerous for every kerbonaut inside it, since it starts pulling to the right at 25 KM while travelling at 1.7km/s. I have basically tried everything, including taking the entire craft apart looking for errant fuel lines. I hoped someone here may be able to find the fault in it. Thanks in advance! Link to craft file: http://pastebin.com/zXd2Yn03

Thanks! So, yeah. There are issues with my design, but it's basically the first spaceplane I made with the intention of carrying cargo. I think I really overbuilt it, seeing how immelman got to laythe, landed and got back on less fuel, but you cannot start out doing everything perfectly. Not really. Most of the delta-v needed for getting into Kerbin orbit comes from atmospheric engine modes, which are much, much more efficient.

Thanks. It took me a long, long time to get to this point (read: I've been playing this game since April last year and basically have been trying to get SSTOs to work since the beginning). Best advice I can give is: start small; single jet-engine spaceplanes still are the easiest, since flame-outs are not really an issue.

So, without any further info on what they look like, this is going to be a bit hard. Could you perhaps post a few pictures of the general designs of you spaceplanes? Also: while you're at it: go to the SPH, empty all the fuel tanks, and check where the centre of mass is compared to the centre of lift. Is it in front of it or behind it?

My god, that thing looks awesome, Overfloater! Congratulations on your awesome-looking spaceplane. And Roguemason: I like the looks of the Adder was well. What's the non-atmposheric delta-v on that thing when topped up? It looks like it can go a long way. As for myself: I promised here that I would do this, so here it is: my SSTO carrier bringing (something of equal weight to) a FL-T800 fuel tank to Duna and returning. Thread is here, but we're here for pretty pictures, so:

Hello there everyone. My psychologist told me a while ago that I should take more pride in what I have achieved. He was talking about my scholarly presentations, but I thought: what the hell. Might as well make a post about the new carrier SSTO I made. It should be able to carry something in the neighbourhood of 6 tonnes to Dunar orbit and return to Kerbin without any refueling. Of course, these things are all nice and well to say without testing, but I had a good reason for wanting to do so. A few days ago, I tested out a new long-range SSTO-VTOL, which, according to my calculations, should've been able to get to the Dunar surface and back to Kerbin on a single tank. But you know theory: it never really works out. In this case because I ballsed up my calculations by forgettign that Duna has an atmosphere, plus some slightly too aggressive flying by Minnard Kerman. So the test run went tits up and Minnard got stuk in a low Dunar orbit with about 300 m/s shy of a return to Kerbin. So obviously, he had to be rescued. I hand-picked Jeb for this mission, since he has lots of experience flying earlier versions of carrier plane and sent Rodford with him for company. They were to fly to Duna, pick up Minnard and, since they were there, the boffins at the science building asked them to leave two brand-new research probes in Dunar Orbit. They were also given a few pieces of paper and were asked down to write down what they thought of the space plane and the auxiliary equipment, since none of it had ever been tested before. Scientist were especially concerned about the Minnard Recovery Vehicle, nicknamed MIRV by the boffins. Jeb was ecstatic when he saw the thing and called it Scooter. So, mission success! Post-mission brieving: So, in short, the mission was a success. The probes were deployed and Minnard was home in time to see his kid's baseball game. There were a few issues with the spacecraft, however. The first was that, as you may be able to read in some of the images, the Eagleray is well over 350 parts, which caused a slowdown of around 2:1. It took me almost a real-life hour to get this monstrosity into orbit. It did so quite fine, however. It was a bit nose-heavy between 10 and 20 KM, but nothing serious enough to warrant an abort. Furthermore: it got into orbit with 3.1 Km/s. Since the mass of the objects I was carrying equalled something like the large 1 meter fuel tank, I did some calculations, and I think this thing should be able to reach Laythe, if it carries an auxiliary fuel tank, which is quite cool. The interplanetary burn showed me a slight defect in the craft: the centre of thrust of the nuclear engine is slightly off, making the craft somewhat squirrelly at full throttle and downright uncontrollable at 4X time acceleration. It should be fixable, but testing it will be a nightmare. And, since I'm using a single nuclear engine, the plane has a horrible T/M ratio of only slightly higher than 1. It may be worth considering sticking on a couple of LV-909ers for those times where you need that extra thrust. The burn back was horrible. The craft was now around 30 tonnes lighter, making the off-centre thrust much more noticable. Furthermore: I overshot by quite a lot while time accelerating the planets into the proper position, making my use at least 500 m/s too much, possibly as much as as 1km/s. Landing went exceptionally well, for something this weight and size (landing weight was still around 30+ tonnes). I was initially planning to land it at KSC, but I accidentally got myself in a clockwise orbit around Kerbin with too little fuel to correct it, and since I was already five, maybe six-ish hours into the mission and it was 4 AM, I decided not to do a few attempts at figuring out how landing at a specific point from a clockwise orbit works and just to land on the nearest piece of earth I could find. Additionally: some lighting in the cargo bay would be nice for docking/undocking, I think. And perhaps I should try to make the crew entrance a bit more acceptable. It took me nearly the entire RCs tank of that poor Minnard to squeeze him in there without the Kraken showing it's ugly head. This could also be fixed, however, if I was allowed to rotate a kerbal in all three axes. As for the scooter: it is the worst thing I have made and used on a mission. I did not balance the thing at all, making the CoT way out of line with the centre of mass. I was constantly fiddling around with the thrust limiters so it wouldn't go completely off-vector. Further design issues were forgetting to put on some batteries, making it uncontrollable for about a fourth of each orbit, and putting the thrusters slightly wider than the width of the cargo bay, making me do some annoying turning to avoid scratching the carrier while docking. Some lights would've helped as well. Furthermore: all these problems were exacerbated by the ridiculously low orbit Minnard was in (50 KM), making the entire process take too long, since I couldn't get past 10X time acceleration. The ion probes performed admirably. Due to their exceptionally low weight (600 kilos) they had only a slightly lower acceleration than the Eagleray and I did balance these properly. The only issue was that I put the probe body on the wrong way around, which will make it somewhat annoying when I'm going to do some actual manoeuvres with them in the future. So, yeah. I don't have much more to say, I think. Thanks for reading this!

Tylo has an equatorial radius of 600M and a maximum height of 11K, while Eeloo has a maximum height of 3.9K and an equatorial radius of 210M. That means that the planet size/height ratio will be pretty much the same. To see which one would "feel" the fastest, I'd just take your wanted height for the stations on both planets and calculate the time it'd take for you to do a single lap around the planet.

Ouch... But yeah, I guess that that would be the case indeed. Computational time probably increases more than linearly with the number of parts in the model. What kind of CPU are you using? I5 2550K over here. It's probably the best buy I ever did.

I'm not too familiar with the abbreviations, since I try to keep a completely stock install (had some really bad experiences with save files breaking due to mod incompatibilities in other games), what do they mean? And yeah: the problem was significantly less at higher altitudes, but still noticeable. As someone with a minor in informatics, by the way: it's not really lag. Lag is a delayed response to input, but what I was (and you too, probably) experiencing is a general slowdown. It may seem a bit nit-picky, but especially since this game isn't out of beta yet, not confusing these terms is somewhat more important.

As shown in this thread: make backups. At least have a single one on your computer in case something gets corrupted. If you have important/really cool stuff: do it on at least one other medium not directly connected to your pc as well.

I had this once as well. I still don't know what caused this, but for some reason: it decided not to load a couple of parts, and everything with those parts on it in flight was removed from the game. I think just restarting KSP did the trick for me, and if that didn't, it was reinstalling it. As for save files: I try to make a backup at least once a week, both onto the other hard drive in my PC and to my dropbox folder.

Today I found out the limits of my computer. The SSTO I built to get some stuff to Duna was over 350 parts with all stuff added on and weighed 65 tonnes. It took me 25 in-game minutes to get it into orbit, but it was more like 45 in real minutes. Not fun...

I have tried a few designs, but I found them to have little to no real use over a regular rocket, really. If anyone could tell me why, I'd love to hear it. Is it mostly for easier reentry or something? Furthermore: since it looks cool, I wanted to go for the actual space shuttle design, and overcoming the center of thrust/center of mass issue was really hard.

Phew. It took me all day, but I've finally designed a one which is able to go to duna (4.5Km/s left after attaining an 110 km orbit) while carrying an FL-t800 fuel tank. Full weigh at the runway: 65 tonnes (empty something like 25 to 30). I'll do some further testing on it landing it (I don't know if 8 landing gears is enough to land it safely) and seeing if maybe adding some emergency rocket engines is a good idea (non-atmospheric engines currently limited to a single nuclear engine). I'll take some pictures of me doing the mission tonight or tomorrow and post them here. EDIT: ****... Forgot the substract the cargo tank... It's only 2984 Km/s...